The Pirate Bay plans to offer encryption services to people who use the BitTorrent tracker site in a direct attempt to combat a new controversial snoop law passed in Sweden last week.
Peter Sunde, who is one of the men behind the notorious tracker site, said in a blog post yesterday:
"Many people have asked me what we’re …

But how...

It's the end of the net as we know it

and I feel fine!

If they actually manage to make this work, then every other government on earth will leap on the bandwagon too. Governments sure do love snooping on their citizens and the internet sure is a thorn in their collective sides right now.

As for appealling to ISP's to ban Sweden, I have to say "LOL". ISP's absolutely hate their customers using bittorrent so if a web site that is a notorious figurehead for same exhorts them to do something that could be seen as promoting or enabling the cause of file sharing (regardless of whether it has perfectly legal applications or not) they will more likely go out of their way to do the exact opposite.

!0 out of 10 for the idea, but problem with the execution

I think its unlikely that the Tier 1 providers will cut links to Sweden to aid lawbreaking.

While I don't agree with snooping I am concerned that the sick element of society (such as paedophiles) will exploit this, do the Pirate Bay really want to be associated with this?

Also it will lead to governments making concerted efforts to break encryption such as RSA (as they are getting to the point where they might have enough horsepower) which will undermine secure transactions on the net such as banking and shopping because once the genie is out of the bottle there (the secrets of how to break it are revealed) there is no putting it back in so all of your data will be open to anyone that wants access.

Re: How long before

I though pirates were evil?

Thats what it says on my DVDs. But this lot are actually trying to help consumers, while the evil corporations are trying to spy on us and monitor us. It's like everything is backwards man. I'll never trust anything I'm ever told on a DVD again.

@Anonymous Coward

Torrent swarms

Unless you use a program like Peer Guardian, this is snake oil.

Swedish ISPs and MAFIAA goons get IP addresses from getting a hold of the torrent file, downloading the target, and seeding. They then harvest the peers who connect for IP addresses. SSL will only protect against knowing which .torrent file was downloaded, not the swarm which the torrent connects to.

Secure VPN tunnelling or onion routing (a la Tor) go some way to helping protect against this, but only marginally. Plus, bandwidth overhead becomes a major issue.

This may win the battle, as they say, but it won't win the war. To do that, we need to get the law overturned. That means we need more than some minority Swedish political party to stand against it in Europe.

Burgled?

Money ....Honey Pots of IT

Honey...Pots of IT.

By amanfromMars

Posted Monday 23rd June 2008 11:41 GMT

Oops...... spot the deliberate error .... "All computers are pre-shipped with government sanctioned key-loggers just to get around "criminals/drug-dealers/tourists/pedo-files" which is probably rather more accurately reported/spun/transcribed ...All computers are pre-shipped with government sanctioned key-loggers just to get into and around criminals/drug-dealers/tourists/pedo-files.

@ IP rights fascists

How would I feel if something I spent the last ten years of my life working on, suddenly available on a P2P network? Well, provided that I didn't put it there myself, and it wasn't loaded with backdoors, or some other "bad things". I would probably feel about the same as the guy who goes to the patent office only to find out that his next door neighbor patented the exact same thing 3 days earlier. And that would be, screwed, shit out of luck, and cleaning my firearms for imminent use. That is why you keep these kind of things secret, off the net, and properly protected.

Sure, your users may complain that they can't make a proper "backup copy", of your software because you have crippled it in some way. But thats what you have to do. And yes, people will steal your idea, make clones, look alikes, work alikes and every possible legal and in some cases illegal variation of your work. Why would they do this? Because your work is good, took a long time and has value to them or others and they want a slice of your pie. This is basic human nature and no amount of legislation will be able to stop it. You should, as some more enlightened people do, compensate for this in your projected revenue stream.

Imagine a world in which this didn't happen. Where reverse engineering didn't exist and cheap knock-offs were not available. imagine a world where you have to pay royalties for anything based on a wheel, or pulley, or fulcrum, to the original inventor or descendants. How about paying for a right to use license for every PN junction in your new digital toy, or every transistor in you latest bit of kit. Would that be a world you could live in?

Instead we have accepted a world in which you can be sued if your "round thing that helps things move", provides a similar function to another "round thing that helps things move" or for figuring out that you can copy the "round thing that makes things move", and give it to all your friends, because they like things that move too.

Give up, get off your high horse, either put your stuff out there, get what you can for the few seconds that you can, and contribute to the forward motion of mankind, or stay in your dark little closet, muttering to yourself "ooo, look at me, I made a wheel, I will call it precious"..

Simple Solution

A simple solution and one no doubt already in the pipeline for defeating this Swedish Law is Botnets hammering the living heck out of the servers that the Swedes decide to use to monitor all traffic crossing their borders.

How long, I wonder, before they realise that actually trying to enforce this law will be a giant pain in the rear. The Swedish Government have just painted a huge "hit me" sign on themselves. Any server they try to use in enforcing this law will become a botnet magnet overnight.

Meanwhile, Pirate Bay of all people appear as the saviours of our freedoms, when in fact they and other dubious file sharing sites played a large part in encouraging the Swedish Parliment to pass the law in the first place.

The crazy part of the whole thing is if the Swedes had set the boundaries of the law better, ie., only targeting p2p protocols and other traffic going to sites suspected of illegal activity. Then no one could have any real complaint that would withstand serious scrutiny.

I hope the party challenging them over privacy are successful. A blanket snooping law on all internet traffic is despicable and does seem to have some serious flaws in regard to human rights regarding privacy.

Software patents are fundamentally wrong!!

Lets face it software patents came about because businesses were/are too lazy to make money creatively. The words Cash and Cow spring to mind.

Software houses do an excellent job of making amazing software and the programmers do require recognition and recompense, but ultimately the money made to pay for them should come from a more creative business practice.

If all software were free, then everyone would be more productive and spend their money on the products and services that have been more creatively thought out, both by the use of this free software and by more directly related services, such as support. One only has to look at Sun, or HP to see that if you offer software for free you can sell Hardware for it to run on.

Office 2007 to NHS staff (the missus in this instance), for £18 ?

Woe the day, for Microsoft, Adobe et al, when the only way to get software is to pay for it, their revenue will take a nosedive as the Shareware, and Freeware mob actually get their act together to supply competent product that does the same job - at a fraction of the price; the additional income will serve to enhance the product, and marketing, considerably.

Many small business we deal with (support - not sofware supply I might add!) couldn't begin to afford full retail, or licensed copies for every member of staff.

What's the old saying "give me the child and I will give you the man" (thank's I'm aware of the religous group its attributed to) when the young guy can't get hold of a free copy to learn with, he will take the alternative....... and stick with it.

Reminds me of the notion that every "stolen" .mp3 on a hard disk represents a lost sale, absolute bollocks.

Having said that, can anyone explain to me how Microsoft can afford to offer, direct, a copy of Office 2007 to NHS staff (the missus in this instance), for £18 ?

(and lots more software at similat prices) if it isn't 'cos the rest of the punters are paying well over the odds for it?

@Colin

@@the cowardly thieves who will post soon

Hahaha....oh the irony, Mr Anonymous...Ahahaha....Are you actually as stupid as you appear to be?

Try not posting anonymously, you pathetic, confused COWARD.

Let me guess, are you an `artist` or some kind of leech who works for a record label or publishing house? Or possibly someone in law enforcement?.

Really, even being as hard of thinking as you appear to be, surely posting anonymously only moments after you use the word `Coward` in your title would ring alarm bells in even your tiny little mind, no?

I'm not going to rebuff your comments, as several others have already done this quite eloquently enough. Bottom line, it's not permanently depriving someone of a posession. It's not theft. It's copying. They are NOT the same thing, and if you can't work that out, maybe you should stick to just watching the shit they put on the telly which is designed to keep people of your ilk amused.

@Goat Jam

ISPs love P2P. Otherwise there would be no point to big fat internet pipes to the home and no extra revenue for even bigger pipes. What ISPs want is to both appear to be on the side of law and order whilst squeezing more money out of content providers and consumers.

@@@@@ all the copying is not the same as burglary. On one level it is not, but on another level it is.

When you copy something [in this context] you are obtaining something that you would otherwise have had to have paid for. Accordingly you are depriving the rights holder and all the normal chain or distribution etc. of an amount equal to what you would otherwise have paid. This is simple and straightforward. You may not have smashed their window and rummaged through their drawers but they are out of pocket.

The argument that when you copy something you are not depriving someone because you wouldn't have bought anyway is specious and frankly retarded on so many levels. If you want something that has an attached cost you either pay the cost or go without the item. Or accept that what you are doing is morally and legally wrong and other people are being hurt by your actions.

And no I am not an artist, I am not a shill for big record companies, or small ones and I have nothing to do with the filth either.

@David Neil

OK I take your point but I'm more concerned at the potential undermining of security on the net for more important stuff (like managing ones bank account).

Dunno about you but I dont want to work in a world that I work for no reward whatsoever and they sure as hell aren't going to start giving gas, electric, food and clothing away for free and for this reason there will be scumbags that want to plunder your hard earned gains.

Think about this, at the moment, the only real way to get access to a system operated by a financial institution from the Internet side (code injections aside) is using the username and password which are gained by either a) the establishment of a fake site to harvest data or b) covert installation of a key logger, they have not...yet figured out a way to break the encryption stream and attack the system directly.

If encryption is used frivolously for applications such as this, more concerted efforts will be made by governments to break it and you can bet there will be some bent official only too willing to allow access to the computing facilities and or methods for cracking it in exchange for the right price, therefore all of us will then be at risk.

Strays...

Why is it that every time a post, article, blog, or other dribble of varying forms, hits the internet, in a location that allows the general (read: uneducated) public to repsond, and is in any way, shape, or form, related to filesharing of any sort, the initial details get blurred, and obscured by a deluge of piracy/anti-piracy advocates starting the same too-many-years-old flame war?

The real concern here is not whether filesharing is "OK" or "Not OK", Legal or Illegal.. The issues are the laws in Sweden allowing the government there to monitor anything they like that you do online, and the responses to this law. Sure, it is TPB that is the frontrunner here, and yes, they may run a questionable service.. But the fundamental concerns of blanket snooping laws and the bigger concern that those laws allow anythign and everythign they "see" to be shared globally... THAT is what should be discussed.. I for one, and not all that thrilled to know that a country can blatantly disregard any rights of privacy I may have online...

But, what can we expect from a country who's most famous export is "Bork Bork Bork"

@ Charles

There is no "bulletproof" method to stop hackers from nailing any system out there.

If there was then all the IT Security companies in the world would have gone out of business. Think of the headlines by El Reg and others.

All Your Black Hats are Belong To Us, Pwned!!!!!!!!

Hardened against attacks means nothing to a hacker group determined to kick your system out of it's nice shiney ivory tower. Hardened only means it takes them longer or that they need a bigger botnet to do it is all.

@ amanfromMars

Heads up! Black helicopters!

I don't know if you all realise the preternatural nature of the forces behind this parlimentary ruling. Sweden is a consensus society, traditionaly, rules and regulations are debated endlessly by untold commitees until consensus is reached. Here we have a law that breaks the Swedish constitution and the EU human right laws, that is proposed, rejected, amended and passed in the space of 2 days, in the face of massive public critisism. Remember this, in years to come you will be able tell your grandchildren you where alive when the first cracks in the dike appeared.

@ pctechxp

"If encryption is used frivolously for applications such as this, more concerted efforts will be made by governments to break it and you can bet there will be some bent official only too willing to allow access to the computing facilities and or methods for cracking it in exchange for the right price, therefore all of us will then be at risk."

Two points - 1 the way this country is going if they really wanted to look at your bank account they would get the local council to have a look, and 2 - You seriously think that they will only have a go at looking at trafic cos your pilfering a few films? Phorm?

Stop;

Hammertime.

This is directed at the man who asked if anyone here has ever been burgled:

There is a distinction in law between copyright infringement and theft. Why is this, you ask?

Because there is a difference; this means that your comparison is ridiculous. Also, insert suggestion that not being able to separate between the two aforementioned concepts may be indicative of inferior intellect.

@pctechxp

"If encryption is used frivolously for applications such as this, more concerted efforts will be made by governments to break it and you can bet there will be some bent official only too willing to allow access to the computing facilities and or methods for cracking it in exchange for the right price, therefore all of us will then be at risk."

There're other encryption algorithms; the only reason AES is the standard is because it is the one that the NSA and NIST gave the thumbs up to. There are other secure systems, they're just not verified by the spooks and the pencil pushers (which admittedly does give me less confidence in them).